For our fall pilgrimage, we will tour of Superior Packaging and Finishing, which operates from two buildings with 200,000 ft² of space and 200 staff. Superior specializes in custom solutions for programmatic clients by managing the complete food chain from website development, order capture, product manufacture, and delivery. They manufacture books, record sleeves, packaging, and specialty services with order sizes from 1 to millions. 

The tour will include their pressroom with an HP large format 6-color latex press, two Indigo 15000 digital presses, a Landa S10 Nanopress (a full Kamori offset press with Landa inkjet technology enabling printing of 6500 unique sheets per hour at 1200 dpi and up to 7 colors), a Heidelberg 4-color Speedmaster, a Heidelberg 6-color Speedmaster, and a Heidelberg 10-color Speedmaster with roll feed printing at 18,000 sheets per hour. You will see their structural design lab where they create custom products for packaging and book applications, as well as the bindery with state of the art, cutting, folding with robotic stacking, die-cutting, in-line folding and gluing, saddle stitching, mechanical binding, spot UV and foil embellishment, foil stamping, Smyth sewing with robotic stacking, case making, perfect binding, hard cover casing-in, shrink wrapping and packing. 

Annual Members Meeting

Life for citizens in WWII-era France was one of privation—and was also awash in official documents. As the country was carved up into zones both free and occupied, people were required to carry identification at all times. Town halls and police prefecture kept current records; all employers, from the largest companies to small shops, issued proof of employment. And every document was signed, witnessed, and stamped (often multiple times) in a bureaucratic system that created endless paperwork.

Those who found themselves in danger of arrest and deportation needed access to “dossiers” of false papers, whether they planned to flee the country or hide in plain sight. Organizations that aided Jews and other refugees quickly recognized the need for forged documents, and began to build networks of those with the skills to create them. Some forgers, such as Adolfo Kaminsky in Paris and Oscar Rosowsky in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, used their training in chemistry and typewriter repair to adapt or invent methods of document alteration and reproduction that helped to save the lives of thousands of individuals.

Early forgery techniques involved hand-carving replicas of official seals and stamps. Members of La Sixieme recount clandestinely slicing out scraps of the linoleum flooring beneath their seats in subway cars to carve later. More detailed originals were nearly impossible to replicate until two existing technologies were adapted to change the game: stencil duplicators and photoengraving.

This talk is the result of three years of research: handling forged materials at the offsite archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; looking at forgers’ own collections of purloined stamps and seals on microfiche at the Musée de la Shoah in Paris; and visiting the small town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, where Rosowsky set up his printing workshop in a stone barn, warmed in the winter by cows. She will present the work of some of the best-known French forgers and discuss the printing techniques they adapted to create documents that looked genuine enough to pass inspection under life-or-death circumstances. 

Warmth & Snap: What New Type Owes WA Dwiggins

Nearly a century ago, as W. A. Dwiggins was nearing 50 years old, he partnered with the Mergenthaler Linotype company to do something he’d never done in his long career: create new typefaces. The resulting designs—such as Metro, Electra, and Caledonia—were instant hits, and are still in use today. They have generated revivals, reinterpretations, and reprises. And the principles of humanism and liveliness that compelled Dwiggins to alter the course of his career continue to guide new type designers. We’ll look at fresh faces steeped in Dwiggins’s legacy (intentional or not), and consider recent trends in a newly burgeoning craft.

50th Annual Dwiggins Lecture, co-sponsored with the Boston Public Library. This talk is open to the public.

Sara Eichner, artist, cartographer, and designer, is co-founder of Studio 2263, a data science and design studio. Her work tackles urban and environmental challenges by combining creative design and data visualization to communicate complex information to the public. The data is the medium and the encoding is the art that informs the design. She will describe projects from New York City and beyond that use data and cartography in custom digital tools and printed documents to capture some of the stories unique to those places. 

This talk will focus on Zach Lieberman's artistic practice, his decades long work with collaborators, investigations into augmented reality, and new tools for drawing and interactive play.  It will also explore his community building and educational work, introducing projects like openFrameworks and the School for Poetic Computation, an experimental school he helped co-found.   He will also showcase the work of the Future Sketches group at the Media Lab, which is investigating and helping to shape what art and design of the future may look like. 

Since the mid-1990’s, printer Daniel Keleher and visual artist Thorsten Dennerline have worked together at Wild Carrot Letterpress in a variety of roles and projects. They met when Thorsten found Wild Carrot in the yellow pages and got a job helping in the shop, which developed into a complex collaborative relationship.

Their work methodology reflects their shared interest in machines of various kinds and in the highest refinement of fabrication of art and objects, mixed with acceptance of chaos and disarray. They also share a philosophy of equilibrium between high and low art/culture.

Using examples of their collaborative printing and artist books, this presentation will explore the place where working with craft (material) merges with conceptual practice.

*Please note this meeting is on the second Wednesday due to the New Year’s holiday.

Annual Rheault Lecture

Over the course of five years, Dr. Steven Galbraith, Curator of RIT’s Cary Graphic Arts Collection, and Shaun Foster, RIT Professor of 3D Design, collaborated with 15 students to create a Virtual Reality experience in which users learn how to print on a 19th-century cast iron printing press. The centerpiece of the experience is a 3D model of the Kelmscott/Goudy Press, a press once owned by William Morris and Frederic Goudy, and now preserved at RIT’s Cary Graphic Arts Collection. Dr. Galbraith will recount the creative process, from producing an accurate 3D model of the Kelmscott/Goudy Press to designing the experience to capturing the sounds of the press at work. After the presentation, participants will be invited to try out the experience and virtually print a leaf from William Morris’s edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1896).

Steve Galbraith is Curator of the Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology

The humble ballot illuminates the noble but highly flawed process at the heart of our American democracy. This talk traces the visual story of the printed ballot, from early handwritten tickets to colorful and typographically outlandish examples from the 19th century. Responding to the explosive growth of an evolving electorate as well as a legacy of fraud, the struggle for suffrage, and concerns about voting security, the ballot reveals insights into our electoral process both past and present.

Alicia Cheng is Head of Design at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Before the invention of the gummed envelope in the 1830s, how did people secure their private letters? The answer is letterlocking—the ingenious process of folding, slitting, and securing a letter with a strip of paper and sealing wax so that it becomes its own envelope. The practice, used by historical figures ranging from Elizabeth I and her spymaster to Japanese samurai lords, and now nearly entirely forgotten, was an everyday activity for centuries, across cultures, borders, and social classes. 

Jana Dambrogio provides a sneak peek at Letterlocking, a monograph co-authored by Dambrogio and Daniel Starza Smith, experts who have pioneered the field over the last ten years. The book tells the fascinating story of letterlocking within epistolary history, drawing on real historical examples from all over the world. 

Attendees will have the opportunity to unlock and lock letter models. 

*Please note this meeting is on the second Wednesday of the month due to the Rosh Hashanah holiday.

Source: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049276/letterlocking/

Draw Me Ishmael: The Book Arts of Moby Dick is the first exhibition focused on the book arts of the hundreds of editions published since 1851: the illustrations, binding designs, typography and even the physical structures. Drawn almost entirely from the Phillips Library collection, this intimate gallery space explores decades of creative approaches to interpreting the novel visually in book form. It will shed some light on Melville’s original inspiration and include a contemporary update through recent artists’ books, graphic novels, a translation into emoji and pop-up books. Think untraditionally and independently about Moby Dick, appreciate the variety of approaches to visualizing the novel and explore copies of more than 50 books on display.

Typography has been key to the identity of The New York Times from its earliest days, providing cohesion as well as opportunity as the company expands. This talk will include the early evolution of the front page, the impact of the digital era, and the challenges of designing for new properties, products and platforms.

Kelly Doe is the Director of Brand Identity and Standards at The New York Times. Her team focuses on creating foundational identities and supporting typographic and visual systems in close collaboration with creative groups across news, opinion, product, marketing, events, advertising, communications, and commerce. Kelly also maintains a studio practice that has served national and international clients, including museums and news organizations, along with a wide range of publishers, artists, and non­profits.

Silas Munro will explore a selection of significant Black publications from the 20th century through the design of their layouts and their cultural relevance. He will talk about how these histories inspire Polymode’s poetic research process when applied to book design and his work as a design historian. 

Annual Charles Rheault Lecture

On February 1, Kat Stefko will address us on the subject of “The Lives & Afterlives of Printers’ Devices.”

Kat Stefko directs the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, a part of Bowdoin College Library dedicated to collecting, preserving, and making available rare and distinctive materials. Trained as an archivist and art historian, Stefko holds an MSLIS from Simmons College, an MA in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA from Oberlin College. She has more than twenty years’ experience working in libraries and museums, including at Harvard and Duke Universities, Bates and Wellesley Colleges, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Her current research interests include printers’ devices; the Bowdoin College Class of 1825, which included Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; and silhouettes.

This lecture tells the story of one typeface: Empirica, designed by Tobias Frere-Jones and Nina Stössinger. Empirica starts from the most classic letterforms in the Western canon: Roman inscriptional capitals. It is a source of towering importance in the Western letter arts, but it also has a very limited scope, consisting only of capital letters made for carving in stone at large sizes. Moving outward and onward from this nucleus, Empirica attempts to project its logic forward, across a larger character set and family structure, to create a versatile typeface family that can be useful and appropriate for contemporary applications. It’s a story about extrapolating from history and imagining alternate timelines and solutions; a story of idealized letterforms that shine through the ages, but also adapt and translate between different eras and their specific tastes and technologies. It also illuminates different ways of working and understanding a type-design process, as Empirica’s development snaked back and forth between custom commissions for specific applications and a retail release that prioritizes usefulness across a wider audience.

Nina Stössinger is a Senior Typeface Designer at Frere-Jones Type, and a Critic for typeface design at Yale School of Art. In addition to several retail typefaces (including Empirica and Conductor, both designed with Tobias Frere-Jones), she has co-designed custom type for Microsoft, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and New York City’s Moynihan Train Hall, among others. Originally from Basel, Switzerland, Nina studied multi-media design in Halle, Germany and type design in Zurich and The Hague. Nina lives in Brooklyn with her cat.

Bill Goldston will recount the improbable saga of Tanya Grosman’s flight from the Russian revolution to a bungalow on Long Island. He will describe her personal resolve to be a publisher and her determination to introduce the creative potential of printmaking to the rising stars of the 60s such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Robert Motherwell and James Rosenquist. And he will explain how he was drawn to what became Universal Limited Art Editions, and how, after Tanya’s death, he guided the studio’s growth and experimentation up to the present.

The publication history of the true first edition of Allen Ginsberg's epochal poem "Howl," which he had duplicated himself in a tiny edition of just 25 copies, has for decades been clouded in rumor and misinformation. Much of this confusion stems in no small part from how Ginsberg printed the poem: by spirit duplicator (also known as "Ditto"). This talk will examine how an understanding of this printing process is vital to a proper understanding of the bibliography, history, and even interpretation of the poem itself.